Wednesday, 31 July 2019

There is no mandate for No Deal

We are told
constantly that the 2016 referendum gives our government a mandate
for a No Deal Brexit, and that we would not respect democracy if we
failed to leave. Both arguments are obviously false, yet they so
often go unchallenged in the media.

The 2016 referendum
was narrowly won by the Leave side. It does not matter how many
people voted in that referendum, the margin of victory was narrow.
What many Leavers would like you to believe is that this referendum
requires the UK to leave the EU in some way or another. This is
false. The referendum did not say that we must Leave the EU whatever
the circumstances and whatever the cost or whatever leaving meant.
None of those words were on the ballot paper, and they were not
implicit either.

Just suppose the
2016 vote had led to the recession predicted by the Treasury. No
recovery from this recession was on the horizon. Suppose too that
Trump had not become POTUS, and Clinton said she had no interest in
doing a trade deal with the UK anytime soon. Polls overwhelmingly
suggest that Scotland would seek independence if we left the EU.
Polls showed support for leaving the EU had dropped to less than 30%, and so on and so on. Are we really saying that despite all this, we
still had to leave the EU because of a 52% majority in an advisory referendum.
The realism of this example is irrelevant if you want to defend the
idea that the referendum was like some kind of contract that had to
be followed come what may. You certainly have no right to call it democratic, or the will of the people

The question was
whether to Leave or Remain. As a result, not surprisingly people
voted on the basis of what they thought Leave or Remain meant. So to see what
people voted for, you need to look at what was discussed. In
particular, the Leave vote will have been influenced by what the Leave side said. And almost without exception, no one on
the Leave side mentioned Leaving without any deal at all. (Of course some Brexiters are now pretending they talked about it all the time - lying is second nature for these people.)

Normally when
someone says that a government has a mandate for a policy, it is
because that policy was in the manifesto presented at the election.
The Leave side did not have a manifesto, and that was a fatal flaw in
Cameron’s referendum. In the absence of a manifesto we have to base
any assessment of what any mandate was on what the Leave side said
Brexit would entail. And almost without exception the Leave side said
it would involve a trade deal with the EU of some sort.

It is true that the
Remain side talked about No Deal as an extreme case in the list of
possible forms of leaving the EU. But when looking at mandates, we
look at what the winning side said, not the losing side. The Leave
side spent a great deal of time ridiculing Remain predictions as
Project Fear, and that included ridiculing the idea that we would not get a deal with the
EU. Some on the Leave side said it would be the easiest deal in
history.

The reason why No
Deal is the only Brexit option left standing is that militant
Brexiters have done everything they can to get us there. They voted
down alternative options their government proposed. It is militant
Brexiters, not a majority of the public, that think No Deal is the
only true form of Brexit. When Brexiters claim that voters were
really voting for No Deal they should be laughed at, but instead our
supine media lets it pass.

What about the idea
that we have to leave with No Deal because otherwise democracy (the
2016 vote) will be betrayed. This is a favourite claim by Farage. The
people who have in fact betrayed Brexit are Farage himself and fellow
Brexiters. They have turned a vote for a Brexit involving a deal with
the EU into something quite different.

Such a claim only
gets mileage because, thanks to the Brexiters, parliament failed to
agree on a deal. But such an outcome was implicit in the 2016 result.
Because the referendum did not specify what type of Brexit should be
attempted, we have no a priori reason to believe that any particular
option would command a majority. Indeed with such a close victory the
presumption must be otherwise, and the polls show this to be the
case. Parliament’s failure to agree a deal simply reflects the fact
that there is no majority for any particular deal.

The idea that we
must go through with Brexit even though there is no majority for any
form of Brexit is nonsensical. It is an illusion created by a flawed
advisory referendum narrowly won which politicians foolishly said at
the time that they would implement. Luckily no politicians is bound
by the foolish promises that other politicians made.

Again a hypothetical
example shows this point. Suppose a similar referendum had been held
on the proposition to increase spending on the NHS by raising taxes,
and it had been narrowly won. However polls also suggested that when
you asked about specific taxes (should we increase NHS spending by
raising income taxes etc) there was no majority to raise any specific
tax. Should the country nevertheless go ahead and raise spending and
choose some arbitrary tax just because of the original referendum
result? It makes no sense to enact something that a majority object
to on the basis of a flawed referendum.

So why do Brexiters
get away with still talking about the will of the people when a
majority clearly favours Remaining to any form of Brexit? Not because
we cannot rely on opinion polls - Leavers will not allow any further
vote to confirm the opinion polls! That in itself is a crystal clear indication that Brexit is undemocratic. Some even say that a further vote
on a specific Brexit deal is undemocratic. In what topsy turvy world
is a public vote to confirm a previous public vote undemocratic.

It is a world where
Brexiters have control of most of the media, and where Brexiters and
some of the people who voted for Brexit are desperate for some
democratic justification for what has become
an assault on pluralist democracy and evidence based policy. If you
repeat something often enough you are in danger of believing it
yourself. Once Tory politicians said at every opportunity that the
previous Labour government was profligate, and because it went
unchallenged people believed it even though it was obviously false.
(Just look at the numbers.) Equally if no one contradicts you when
you say we must leave with no deal because of a narrow referendum win
where no one on the winning side talked about leaving with no deal,
you can convince yourself to enact the biggest act of self-harm in
modern UK history on an unwilling
majority.

20 comments:

You can easily imagine a situation where there is the executive and their backers in Parliament lined up against other MPs in a separate venue somewhere near Parliament with a giant gathering of people in London out to support particularly the Remain side.

Yes, frustrating isn't it. I fluctuate between hope and despair. I have read Paul Krugman NTY articles for years. There was fair complaint about economists who were usually wrong being promoted but always with a sense of - I can cope, I'll battle on. Of late I notice a new despair, that hint of defeat. We have to weather the storm. Thanks for your sane contributions.

I fear that much of the commentary on both sides of the Brexit debate is very confusing. The Withdrawal Agreement negotiated between the EU authorities and the UK Government is not "a deal" or even "the deal". In accordance with Art. 50 it merely sets out the obligations and responsibilities of both parties that must be discharged before the negotiations can begin on the terms of the future relationship between the UK and the EU. That is "the deal".

Even if the UK exits the EU without a formal WA there will still have to be negotiations on the future relationship between the UK and the EU. Some sort of "deal" will have to be cut. Compared to the agreeemnt of a formal WA, the key differences are that positions on both sides will be more deeply entrenched, the key players will be more embittered and any willingness to compromise will have been obliterated.

So it's not a question of a deal or no-deal. The debate should focus on the difference between some sort of formal WA and sensible negtiations on the future relationship or no WA and difficult, complex and fractious engagements seeking to establish some form of modus operandi between the UK and the EU.

And in the meantime? Are you not assuming an instantaneous transmission to the future relationship absent a WA? Our negotiating position in the real world will be disastrous and the timing very long indeed.

Sorry Simon, this is a decontextualised statement and needs to be put in perspective. As an isolated statement it implies that Leaving IN ITSELF is harmful under any circumstances. This is misleading.

Under the Tories, leaving might well be self-harming but then voting Tory is self-harm on aggregate and the deaths of arguably 120,000 people due to austerity is a manifestation of that.

HOWEVER leaving with an APPROPRIATE FISCAL RESPONSE might not be self-harm. massive investment, nationalisation of rail, energy and utilities, land reform and social house building all doable without reference to arbitrary Maastricht deficit limits could be transformative and more than compensate for any tariff issues involved in trade with the EU.

So I think your 'self-harm' assertion about Leave needs that context, other wise you just fuel the irrational and over emotional Remainer mentality that has become as irrational as the 'take back control' (not!) brigade.

Suppose the question had been whether to leave on any terms or if necessary none, and Leave had improbably still won. Would this advisory vote have trumped the Good Friday Agreement, a constitutional document embedded to boot in an international treaty with the United States as guarantor? I think not. Bojo is not entitled to destroy the Union out of pique with the EU.

OK, well. My take: conservatives are good at selling policies based on talking points. But 1. You need to have some idea how to implement your policy and 2. You need to face reality: if conservatives sell the public on an idea whose consequences are known to be unacceptable, they have caused a dilemma for themselves. So with Brexit. So w/ American conservatives who want entitlement reform. Etc.

Far too reasonable a view to ever hope to make a change. You used logic, facts and attempted to persuade. Arguments are won now by who screeches loudest and most simply to a base which through bias, won't accept anything other than that which supports their view. Where those views come from is the first step to figuring out how to stop this from happening again.

I can see a future where parliament votes down No Deal and then, in order to acquire a mandate for it, Johnson calls a general election rather than a referendum. If he can campaign on an explicit No Deal platform while relying on both the Brexit vote and the votes of those who don't want Corbyn as PM he stands a much better chance than in a referendum, and it would strengthen his hold on No 10 also. As things stands Labour and the Lib Dems will split the remain vote while if the Brexit party has any traction among voters it opens up the possibility of a coalition as insurance.

The White paper the government published in 2015 made clear that failure to reach an agreement t would mean we left 2 years after A50 with no deal, so in the not approving May's deal Parliament has in effect voted for No Deal.

Amongst all the things that were said and not said in the run-up to the 2016 referendum, I'm pretty sure that 'if we vote leave we will ask the EU for terms to leave, and if we Parliament doesn't approve the deal then we won't leave' was never uttered by anyone.

But have it your way. Just overturn the Leave vote. Tell yourself whatever you like. I'm not interested. Democracy dies when the losers don't accept the result. But whatever happens after you've played your games, its down to your Remainers. No excuses about the EU wouldn't let us do this or that, or EU rules mean we couldn't do X. You own it lock stock and barrel.

And like most Leavers, I'd like a deal, If we leave with no transition arrangement I'd still like a deal. Hence you are right there isn't a majority for 'No deal' because most leavers want a deal.

just to bang on about this, the reason No Deal was not explicitly discussed is because at the time of the referendum it was assumed the government could go and negotiate a deal. Two things happened - Miller I meant that the deal had to be approved by Parliament, and then despite the vast majority of MPs being elected on manifestoes that committed to leaving the EU, MPs refused to pass the deal. It is an absolute dog of a deal, but that was the route to leaving.

Perhaps MPs think they have done something clever - a loophole - if we don't vote to leave, we will never leave! But this cynical game playing is simply destroying peoples' belief in parliamentary democracy.

Maybe the discrepancy between polls and votes is that the polls do not account for age. If Brits vote like Americans, then older people are more likely to vote. Also, the voting public might be a bit dumber than the average (maybe they are less likely to realize the flaw in the argument "Sure, one vote will never determine the outcome, but what if everyone thought that way?" Something like the reverse of lotteries being a tax on the statistically challenged.) In any event, American polls didn't predict Trump's victory.

“Just suppose the 2016 vote had led to the recession predicted by the Treasury.”

Just suppose that the Treasury had been able to give a correct prediction of the effects of a Leave Vote. How many more marginal voters would have voted Leave? We will never know.

“As a result, not surprisingly people voted on the basis of what they thought Leave or Remain meant. So to see what people voted for, you need to look at what was discussed. In particular, the Leave Vote will have been influenced by why the Leave vote said.”

And the Leave vote will have been adversely affected by the erroneous economic forecasts on the Remain side.

“The Leave side spent a great deal of time ridiculing Remain predictions as Project Fear.”

Yes they supposed that the 2016 would not lead to the recession predicted by the Treasury and they were correct.

It is clear that the Treasury predictions were ‘sexed up’. They predicted that unemployment would rise by 500,000 or 800,000 or that it would be even worse than that. Nowhere did they say that employment could be better than the predicted values let alone that we might now enjoy record employment levels. This is despite the fact that the report was supposedly written to allow voters to make an informed choice. The Treasury and other economists have not held themselves accountable for the gross errors in their economic forecasts to date. We have no way of knowing the extent by which their forecasts for a ‘No Deal’ have been similarly ‘sexed up’.

I think our blogger uses democracy as a flag of convenience.It wasn’t that long ago that he wrote this.

“No Deal is not an actual deal, and would also fail to learn the lesson of 2016: don’t give voters an option that parliament thinks is disastrous.”

So democracy is OK provided voters are restricted on what they can vote for. They should be barred from voting for an option that was supported by 35% at the European elections and 49% in the Brecon by-election. We should ignore the fact that Labour and the Liberals voted in 2013 against the recommendations of the independent Boundary Commission, thereby reducing Cameron’s majority to 12 rather than 32. Parliament is sovereign however much the opposition parties gerrymander its composition to their advantage.

If our blogger is really concerned about democracy, then he should have the integrity to support a genuine People’s Vote. A true people’s vote would allow people to fully express their preferences by offering a wide range of options. If he does not have this integrity then he is no position to question other people’s integrity and frankly he should shut up.

"Again a hypothetical example shows this point. Suppose a similar referendum had been held on the proposition to increase spending on the NHS by raising taxes, and it had been narrowly won. However polls also suggested that when you asked about specific taxes (should we increase NHS spending by raising income taxes etc) there was no majority to raise any specific tax. Should the country nevertheless go ahead and raise spending and choose some arbitrary tax just because of the original referendum result?"

The answer is yes. I have no idea why anyone should think otherwise. That is how referenda work.

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